Eco-Theology Sunday

Scriptures:

 

Leviticus 25:23-24

 

“The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land.”

 

Psalm 24:1

 

“The earth is the LORD’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it”

 

Genesis 2:15

 

“The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.”

 

Sermon:

 

Many of you have heard me talk in the past about some of the early parts of the book of Genesis. Some of you also know that I’m going to be teaching a 9:45am Bible Study on it soon as well. One of the things we’ll study is the things you can notice when you first open up your Bible. For example, please look down in front of you and grab a pew Bible. Now, open it up and turn to the first page – Genesis chapter 1. We all know what’s in Genesis chapter 1 right? Creation! But, let me ask you this, “What’s in chapter 2?” If you look right before the start of chapter 2, you will notice a section heading. That heading says, “Another account of creation.” Wow! Crazy right. Why is there a second account?

 

This boils down to the fact that there are two stories about creation in the first two chapters of Genesis. They’re both there because they both provide different, yet significant insights. I hope that you’ll take this home and look over it for yourself, but I want to briefly highlight some of the differences. In Genesis chapter 1, we learn that the earth is “watery” in chapter 2 we learn that it is “dusty.” In chapter 1 creation happens in 6 days, in chapter 2 it happens in 1 day. In chapter 1 the sequence of creation goes as follows: trees, animals, and humans. In chapter 2 the sequence goes: humans, trees, animals. In Genesis 1, humanity is creation last. In chapter 2, he is created first. In chapter 1, man and woman are created simultaneously, but in chapter 2 the woman is created out of Adam’s rib. Finally, and this is today’s relevant part, in chapter 1 the whole earth is humanity’s domain, but in chapter 2 it’s just the Garden of Eden. 

 

If you take the scriptures a little bit too literally, as in you believe in some sort of hard historical accuracy, you have two options here. You can either say that one story is true and the other false. Or, you can try to wiggle your way out of the problem. This morning I’m going to take these two stories at face value and deal with that tension to some degree. Let’s take a look at these two account’s relationship with the environment. If you look to chapter 1, you’ll find some justification for the entire environmental movement. If plants and animals existed before humanity, then we’re just a small part of a global ecosystem. But, if you take Genesis 2 as your main account then you’ll find that the plants are created entirely and solely for our sustenance. You’ll find something similar with animal rights. The question is, “were animals created to be successful before our existence or were they created to be our playthings?”

 

At this point, many of you may be thinking, “Yay! Let’s go with the first account. Women are even equal, so that’s pretty rad!” The important issue, however, is not just how creation happened, but what it means. It’s a categorical error to think that these stories are meant to inform us of some historical truth. What they’re really concerned with is conceptions of meaning – of what creation means. Sometimes the Bible, like really good literature, uses contradiction to illustrate a larger truth. Sometimes this is referred to as a “dialectic.” This word comes from the root of the word “dialog” and in many ways it refers to that. 

 

Sometimes, when we encounter the tensions of different narratives we may near from the neighbor on our left and the neighbor on our right we may find a better conception of truth. Whoever wrote Genesis decided that it was better to leave both stories in the final product than to leave one out because they both brought something to the table. 

 

This is precisely why we have theology. To give it a brief definition, theology is the study of ideas about God and it often functions in a systematic way. In other words, good theologies often try to form coherent systems of ideas about God. When humans look at a particular passage in the Bible, it doesn’t tell us everything we need to know about life. Instead, we have to come up with ideas of understanding what it is we’re reading and how that relates to things we’ve read elsewhere. Theology is the thing that helps us organize and think about all the things we learn, particularly as they relate to God.

 

We come to subjects like salvation, the afterlife, and the church’s position on women as a collective result of our understandings of scripture. Some of us probably even believe in something called natural theology – which looks at aspects of the divine through things like nature, experience, and reason. And so it is in this way that we should approach a theological topic like the environment – or to put it in nice Christian lingo, “creation.” Eco-theology is a discipline of inquiry into what it means to be human in the midst of this vast creation that God has made. It’s an effort to draw out the things that the scriptures might teach us about creation and our relationship to it. 

 

Like most theological movements, eco-theology has grown out of an experienced need. In many respects, it plays on old themes that one can kind find throughout Christian history, but to new tunes. Just to give you some perspective, in 1996 The Economist reported that The Alliance of Religious Conservation had identified more than 120,000 religiously-based environmental projects around the world. Twenty years later we can still say that a lot probably needs to be done. Surprisingly, seminaries and theologians have not been at the forefront of this. Many have certainly gotten involved in more recent years, but this response has been largely driven by normal people within their churches – it has to a large extent been a bottom up movement, rather than a top down one.

 

Yet, many denominations have offered up catechisms or statements concerning the issue. For example, the Episcopal Church released a Catechism of Creation in 2008 which states,

“A theology of creation presents the Church’s thinking about the relationship between God and the world as it is informed by understandings of Holy Scripture and observations of nature. It seeks to express in human language the mysteries of this relationship. It is not a theory about the universe but a doctrine about the God who creates it.”

The statement reflects one of the best sayings from a theologian I’m not too fond of, Thomas Aquinas, who stated that the, “Sacred writings are bound in two volumes, that of creation and that of holy scripture.” Likewise, the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church stated in 1995 that,

“...[T]o commit a crime against the natural world is a sin. For humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God's creation; for humans to degrade the integrity of Earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the Earth of its natural forests, or destroying its wetlands; for humans to injure other humans with disease; for humans to contaminate the Earth's waters, its land, its air, and its life, with poisonous substances; these are sins.”

I mention these quotes not to argue that we should fall in line with natural theology, but to suggest that the Church might be going through another Reformation. One of the old saying of the Reformation was, “Reformed and always reforming.”

 

The Church has to think about the things that happen in the world. That’s what relevance is about. We have to address things like poverty and community, but we also have to think about larger issues and provide people with a sense of hope and meaning. You may have noticed that all of the scriptures we read this morning were rooted in the idea of creation. In Leviticus we heard that we don’t own the land we occupy, but merely act as caretaker’s who work God’s redemption upon it. In Psalm 24:1 we heard that the Cosmos belongs to God, which begs the question, “How should we take care of God’s things?” In Genesis chapter 2, we heard that God put man in the Garden of Eden to till and keep the land.

 

I’d like now to remind you of a couple more passages. In Romans 8:19, Paul writes that “creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” This statement is loaded with the sense of Shalom – the well-being, peace, and wholeness that of all creation. Somehow our salvation is supposed to be linked with a sense of systematic peace between the different elements of creation. Likewise, in Genesis we have similar messages about our obligations to be good stewards over what God gave us. In Genesis 1:28 we read,

“God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’”

 

Many might believe, at first glance, that this says that we can use creation for our own purposes – without care for things like balance. It has often been seen as a license to dominate and abuse creation. Yet, the meanings we read into words like “subdue” and “dominion” are different than those intended by the Hebrew.

“The command to ‘subdue’ (kabas) Earth focuses particularly on cultivation, a difficult task in ancient days. ‘Subduing’ involves development in the created order. This process offers to the human being the task of intra-creational development, bringing the world along to its fullest possible creational potential. God’s command passes on to humans the responsibility to act on behalf of creation and to work within the boundaries of our humanness, dealing properly with nature in a way that helps bring forth food and values resources. This has nothing to do with abusive control.” Sarah Ann Sharkey, Earth, Our Home: Biblical Witness in Hebrew Scriptures (Boerne, TX: Sor Juana Press, 2004), 34-35.

In other words, it’s a call to bring about a peaceful and well-balanced order. In Isaiah 11:1-9 and in Acts 3:20-21 we hear a similar theme - an emphasis drawn from Genesis. We hear about a hope for the restoration of all things and God’s intention to bring all things back to their right ordering, particularly in regards to all of creation; and humans are invited to participate in that work. Likewise, when we heard earlier that man was placed in the Garden to till and keep it we’re being given the same word that’s used when we hear phrases like “The Lord bless you and keep you.” 

 

I could go on with other scriptures, but I think you get the idea by this point. We are all called to be good stewards over the things that have been entrusted to us. Yes, this includes our money, our families, and our bodies, but it also includes the world that we have been given. We are asked by God to care for the things that we have been entrusted with.

I’ll end with a personal reflection. As some of you know, I worked as a public policy researcher in Princeton for much of my time in Seminary and even some time after. The Bonner Foundation has a bureau called “Policy Options” that coordinates an internal network between a large number of universities, nonprofits, and foundations. I was often assigned to issues of agriculture, climate change, and the environment because my undergraduate thesis related to those fields. To summarize, my thesis argued that the U.S. government should invest in subsidizing an alternative cash crop in Afghanistan because we’d never be able to win the war there if we couldn’t undercut the growth and sale of poppies to the Taliban, who in turn the poppies into opiates. In other words, win over the farmers by giving them a more lucrative crop option – like switchgrass which can be turned into ethanol, something that’s used as fuel – so that their livelihoods aren’t aligned with the Taliban.

 

To get more to the point, we have the technology to not have to use oil-based gasolines and the resources we need are readily available in the mid-West, namely native prairie grasses whose growth is already paid for by you – the taxpayer. Unfortunately, politics and politicians suck. When there’s money to be made, we often find people aren’t paying as much attention to the question, “How can we govern wisely?” The economist Milton Friedman even wrote in his book Capitalism and Freedom, that there are problematic situations where businesses create collective costs through environmental violence, like pollution, that effects many people yet remains difficult to exact compensation for. Actions like this violate his principles of a ‘free exchange’ which constitute the foundation of Friedman’s vision for capitalism - something voluntarily engaged in, which is why he stresses his idea of ‘freedom’ so much.

 

To wrap up this tangent, I’d just like to suggest that there’s always more for us to do. God asks us to be good stewards of what we’re given. That includes the world that we inhabit. So let us strive to better fulfill that calling. Amen.